European coverage of the United States is extensive and still frequently misleading. Not because the reporting is inaccurate, but because European concepts get applied to a system that works on fundamentally different lines.
A few differences that keep coming up.
Parties aren't parties
The most important point. In most European countries a party is an organisation with membership, dues, conferences, programmes, and a leadership that selects candidates.
American parties are none of that. There's no membership in the European sense — party affiliation in many states is simply an entry on the voter roll that you declare when registering.
Crucially, the party doesn't choose its candidates. Primaries do, with registered voters participating. Party leadership can neither block a candidate nor impose one.
So when people ask why "the Republicans" or "the Democrats" don't intervene, the answer is usually that there's nobody with the power to. They are loose coalitions, not organisations with authority.
Party discipline barely exists
The next difference follows directly. A European legislator who regularly votes against their own group runs into trouble at the next selection.
An American representative is elected directly in a district and only needs to win the primary there. If deviating from the party line is popular in that district, it's rational behaviour.
That explains why American majorities look so unstable. A party can hold a majority and pass nothing, because individual members are pursuing their own interests.
Federalism goes much further
Germany is federal, but central areas are regulated nationally: criminal law, civil law, social insurance, and education in broad terms.
In the US, states regulate criminal law, family law, election law, education, insurance and much else. There's no national regulation of how elections are run — each state, and in many cases each county, organises them itself.
Which is why statements about "the USA" on many topics are close to meaningless. The differences between individual states are larger than the differences between some European countries.
Courts are political actors
In Germany the prevailing understanding is that courts decide law and politics decides politics. Appointments to the constitutional court follow political arrangements but are largely treated as a consensus process.
In the US federal judges are appointed for life and appointment is an openly political process. At state level, judges in many places are elected directly, with campaigns and donations.
So courts there are understood as political institutions — by everyone involved, not only by critics. Reading that through European expectations produces regular misunderstandings of what's actually happening.
Turnout and access
A difference that's practically enormous and rarely explained. In Germany you automatically receive polling notification, because a population register exists.
In the US there's no such register. Anyone wanting to vote must register themselves, and the rules vary considerably between states — deadlines, documentation, procedures.
Which is why the question of who may vote and how easy it is remains a permanent political conflict there. In Germany it simply isn't an issue, because the administrative system settles it in advance.
Money in campaigns
The orders of magnitude aren't comparable and the legal framework is different. Political donations in the US are substantially understood as an expression of free speech, which sharply limits how they can be regulated.
On top of that, members of the House are elected every two years. That means permanent campaigning and a permanent need for money.
Anyone wondering why particular interest groups carry so much weight there — a significant part of the answer is that two-year cycle.
What follows from this
One more structural feature that explains a great deal and is almost never mentioned: the calendar.
American elections are on fixed dates set in law. There is no mechanism for calling an early election, no confidence vote that can bring down an administration, no possibility of a government falling and being replaced.
That has consequences that a European reader may not anticipate. A president with no legislative majority remains in office for the full term regardless. A legislature at odds with the executive cannot resolve the standoff by going to the country. Deadlock is not a crisis to be broken; it is a normal condition that simply persists until the next scheduled date.
This is why American political conflicts often appear to grind on without resolution in a way that would be unsustainable in a parliamentary system. The system has no reset button, by design — the framers considered stability more valuable than responsiveness. Whether that trade still looks wise is a live argument there, but it is the frame within which everything else happens.
My practical advice when reading US coverage: always ask what level something is happening at. Federal, state and local are entirely different arenas.
And read formulations like "the party decided" sceptically, because the body that might have decided it usually doesn't exist.
None of this makes American politics simpler. But it prevents the most common misjudgement, which is assuming somebody is at the controls and simply declining to pull the lever.